Book #12: Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder

I read Little House in the Big Woods before we left for Christmas and I was planning to read all the rest of the series after we got back. I may still get to the other books, but I have so many other books I keep getting from the library that I might not get to them very soon, so I might as well write down this one so I don't forget about it. I feel like these books are the written equivalent to chicken noodle soup or a hearty lasagna--they're comfort food as opposed to a super fancy dish that you spend hours slaving over to impress company. Reading this book is mostly delightful because of the impressions it made on me when I was little, more than the joy it gives me now. It is so fascinating to read and to think that this really was just a few lifetimes ago--some really old people today may have known people who were really old who'd lived this way on the prairies, you know? And now the whole area where the Ingallses lived is probably covered by suburbia or industrialized farms or something like that. It was so cool reading about how Pa just built up the entire house and a barn from absolutely nothing and how they built an entire life out of this random spot on the prairie that they chose, and then how they just left it after a few years to start completely over somewhere new.

I'd been listening to a "Stuff You Missed in History Class" podcast that mentioned a different book by Wilder, The Long Winter, and one of the things they mentioned was the "problematic" depiction of Indians in that book, and how it was so stereotypical and painted Indians to be just the way white people thought they would be (I'll just say "Indians" here because that's what the book called them). And I think it's a little unfair to hold Laura Ingalls Wilder up to today's standards of political correctness (she was writing her books some seventy years ago), but I did notice that a lot in this read-through of this book. There's a lot of discussion of the Indians and what they were doing, and a few times Pa said things about how the soldiers would make the Indians pack up and move to another reservation so that they could have that land (which today we clearly think was unfair). But really, I thought the presentation of Indians in this book was pretty positive and fair, compared to how potentially negative it could have been. Laura as a child was clearly fascinated with the Indians and always loved seeing them, even when she was afraid of them, and mostly the Indians treated the Ingallses very well and warned them of dangers. So I thought it was a pretty positive depiction of them from the 1800s, in my very limited understanding of it all.